The Telegraph
June 06, 2006
THE INVENTION OF COMMUNAL ILL WILL
Memories of conflict become long-term sectarian hatred only in very special
circumstances, writes Tapan Raychaudhuri
Refugees coming to India from Pakistan,1947
Professor Muhammad Habib, in his brilliant essay on Sultan Mahmud of Ghazni,
concluded his statement as follows: “We owe him the bitterest drop in our
cup, the poison of communalism.” A recent essay on the destruction of the
Somnath temple suggests that there may be an element of the misreading of
evidence in the statement. The essay fails to find in contemporary sources a
great upsurge of Hindu revanchism generated by the happenings at Somnath.
The event, it seems, did not instantly produce broods of Togadias asking for
Ghazni’s blood. The destruction of temples and sacking of cities surely do
not endear conquerors to the victims. But was temple destruction more
hurtful than murder and rapine, which accompanied all military conflicts?
The great champions of Hindu glory according to one school of thought, the
Marathas and the Rajputs, spent more time fighting one another than in
defending the Holy Motherland against the vile Yavanas. Did that create any
permanent sense of grievance in one clan of Rajputs or one branch of
Marathas against their counterparts whom their ancestors had fought? If
Togadia had read any history he would know that his beloved Gujarat had
suffered more at the hands of the Marathas than through the lightning
incursions of Ghazni. He has not suggested, so far, that all Marathas
including Bal Thackeray should be hanged, a measure he has warmly
recommended for the country’s Muslims — the Ghaznis, as he calls them.
I have raised these rhetorical issues to make two related points. Wars and
invasions, which have long been integral to human experience, do not create
permanent wounds in the psyche of a people. Oriyas do not hate the memory of
Asoka, nor the Sri Lankans the memory of Prince Vijaya. The very painful
experience of early Norman rule is not cited in English school textbooks as
a reason why British children should grow up to hate Frenchmen. The English
and the Germans, who have fought two bitter wars within a period of three
decades are now close allies, as are the Japanese and the Americans,
Hiroshima and Nagasaki notwithstanding. Memories of conflict become sources
of long-term hatred only in very special circumstances and if, in the light
of later developments, such hatred can be generated and sustained for some
specific political ends.
There is, indeed, a long record of temple destruction in India under rulers
of Turkish or Turko-Afghan origin. This fact has been over-played in a
certain type of historical writing and soft-pedalled in another. Very
recently, an American historian, R.M. Eaton, has tried to analyse the nature
and motivation of such acts in 80 cases. He shows that they were mainly
centred round the shrines to presiding deities of the ruling dynasty and
were meant to deprive the latter of legitimacy derived from divine
protection. It is not certain that the acts provoked great popular
resentment any more than the horrors accompanying conquest usually do. As
evidence, I have pointed out elsewhere that 150 years after Aurangzeb’s
death, Hindus and Muslims fought together to restore the iconoclast’s
descendant to the imperial throne.
A second and more important question: how was the conqueror, the iconoclast,
or the oppressor perceived? Did the Hindu subjects of Turkish or Afghan
kings see them first and foremost as Muslims? The historical evidence
suggests that the rulers certainly did not lay primary emphasis on this
single dimension of their identity. The chroniclers emphasized the family or
clan the rulers come from and the dynasts, of course, as happily fought
other Muslims as they did the Hindu chieftains. And there is no evidence to
suggest that the Hindu subjects, especially their vast majority the
peasantry, saw their Muslim counterparts as rulers, especially oppressive
rulers. If temple destruction and other forms of oppression did generate
resentment, there is nothing to suggest that it was generally directed
against the Muslim component of the civil population, visiting the sins of
the dynasts on their co-religionists among the subjects.
Yet traces of mutual resentment are certainly there in the medieval record.
I shall cite a few stray examples. The fundamentalist mullah was
uncompromising in his emphasis on the need to suppress idolatry. When
Alauddin Khalji stated his inability to concede Qazi Mughisuddin’s demand
that all Hindus be converted or killed, the Qazi advised that Jaziyah be
collected with appropriate humiliation; the kafir should be asked to open
his mouth as he paid the tax and the Muslim collector should spit into it.
Such extreme prescriptions were not implemented, but the attitude which
informed these must have had their ramifications both among Muslims and
Hindus. In short, there was a persistent tradition of fundamentalism which
resented the toleration of idolatry. It is difficult to imagine that
intolerance did not breed resentment. The chronicles often refer to the wars
of conquest as jihad when directed against Hindu chieftains. In Bengal, the
Muslim punthi literature is full of imaginary episodes of battles between
Hindus and Muslims, though interestingly they inevitably end in tales of
reconciliation. In Bengali Vaishnav literature, Chaitanya’s biographies all
refer to tyrannical acts by Muslim rulers. The term used to describe them is
Yavan and such tyranny is cited as one reason for the advent of Chaitanya as
an incarnation.
A couple of centuries earlier, Vidyapati, in a well-known passage, described
the oppression by Turkish soldiers, adding that the Sultan would have
punished the miscreants if he had come to know of their misdeeds. This
allusion provides a clue to our understanding of communal disharmony. The
oppressor here is no remote tyrant, but a humble soldier not very distant in
terms of social level from his victims. And one can see how the hatred of
such petty tyrants, often settled as iqtadars among the local population,
could turn into the hatred of a community. The notion of ‘Muslim tyranny’
probably derived from such experiences. Doctrinally, the medieval smritis
bracketed Muslims with the Chandalas and other untouchables. This may simply
express the Brahminical obsession with purity that prohibited all contact
with people whose ways were ‘unclean’. Muslims certainly learned to live
with this quaint barbarism, but it is not possible that the classification
and the practice did not generate resentment. More than one medieval Bengali
text refers to the oppression of Brahmins and Vaishnavs, their being forced
to carry baskets of beef and the ritual markings on their foreheads being
wiped out with spittle. No one has suggested that these were daily
occurrences, but a single such incident can have widespread ramifications.
The realities of economic and social life begot a pattern of co-existence
and co-operation, and both folk and high cultures were deeply enriched by
the encounter between the two traditions. But occasional outbursts of
tyranny at the grassroots level, probably created the hard core of communal
hatred. The Dutch factor, Pelsaert, mentions that it was not safe for a
Hindu to venture out during a Muharram procession. In a different context,
we find the Vaishnav saint, Shyamananda, telling off the Malla Raja of
Vishnupur for employing Muslim guards. They were duly dismissed.
Bharatchandra, a highly Persianized scholar-poet, records the perceived
differences between Hindus and Muslims in doctrine and practice, and
describes with distaste Alivardi’s iconoclasm. In his writing, all such
conflict ends in reconciliation and that almost certainly was the dominant
reality. But the leitmotif of mutual ill will keeps surfacing over and over
again.
In pre-British days, these were exclusively urban, localized and of very
short duration. They were rooted in social friction — familiar issues of cow
slaughter, music before mosque or the red powder of Holi applied to
unwilling beards. These riots were marked by a degree of ferocity. These
were little flames of hatred which, with the aid of a favourable wind, could
develop into a forest fire.
Under British rule, such ill winds emerged as a dominant fact of life. The
ill will underwent a change in character and assumed unprecedented
dimensions. One factor contributing to this negative development was a
radical shift in the country’s political culture. Social identities,
especially the sense of community, had neither any political connotation nor
any pan-Indian referent, in pre-British days. Two very different influences
altered the character of social and cultural identities. Western education
and the new print-culture made people aware of the possibility and
attraction of nationalism and sub-nationalisms. People became aware, for the
first time in their history, that there was honour and pride in being a
sovereign nation. That other levels of identity — religion-based community,
linguistic groups, caste, sect and so on — could also be matters of pride
and bases for solidarity and, as such, for joint action to enhance one’s
status and/or securing one’s rights became a part of the new social
consciousness. Hence we have a plethora of organizations celebrating the
glories of being Indian, Hindu, Muslim or Bengali, Vaishnav, Kayastha and so
on.
Of these multiple levels of identity and identity-assertion, the two that
proved most potent were the national and the communal. We have emerging
associations of all Indians, and we have great movements for the cultural
self-assertion of Hindus and Muslims respectively. The Hindu lamentation
over fall from Aryan grace, unfortunately, marked the beginning of myths of
alleged Hindu slavery from the days of the Turkish conquest. That conquest
was always referred to as the ‘Muslim conquest’, and the long centuries when
Turkish or Afghan kings ruled the greater part of India as ‘Muslim rule’.
The phrase, ‘Muslim rule’, is a misnomer. Unlike the British at a later
date, the Muslims as a people or community never ruled India. But the notion
projected by British historians became a part of India’s cultural baggage.
Hindu patriots lamented the centuries of alleged Muslim tyranny. Muslim
intellectuals shed tears over their community’s loss of power and glory,
tracing back the fall from grace beyond India’s frontiers and comparing the
current moral degeneration with the utopia under the orthodox Caliphs. These
two mutually exclusive myths nurtured the seeds of conflict which were
always there.
Exclusive identity for Muslims became an object of aspiration at two levels.
Movements for cultural revival, like the one initiated by Shah Waliullah,
traced the source of Muslim fall from power to the incursion of un-Islamic
ways. This implied a direct assault on the elements of syncretism in
Indo-Islamic culture: bida or departure from strict observance of the
sharia, had to be given up. At another level, especially in Eastern India,
ideologically similar movements, the Wahhabis and Faraizis, rooted in
agrarian grievances, emphasized the need for a Muslim way of life unpolluted
by Hindu influences. Since this emphasis was fed by exploitation in the
hands of the Hindu zamindars and moneylenders, the movements acquired a
sharp edge of aggression. Some fierce communal riots were among their
products.
British policy did take advantage of such growing tensions justifying the
thesis that ‘divide and rule’ was a fact of life. But the real contribution
of the raj to the mutual alienation of Hindus and Muslims derived from a
different dimension of imperial strategies. In the constitutional structure
they adopted for India and their executive actions in distributing shares of
power and resources, they recognized Hindus and Muslims as separate
constituencies. Perforce the two began to compete for larger shares qua
communities. Separate electorates clinched the division opening the road to
Pakistan.
This political competition mobilized the elements of mutual ill will: the
nationalist message of the need for unity transcending the barriers of
community lost out. From the mid-Twenties, the underprivileged, especially
in urban areas, were mobilized to fight on the streets in support of what
were essentially elite causes. Current post-modernist analysis questions
such theses and emphasizes the autonomous agency of the underprivileged. But
the vicious communal riots, mid-1920 onwards, can be shown to be anything
but spontaneous outbursts. Much of the horrendous killing during the
partition riots were carefully orchestrated. Such studies as we do have of
this violence do not unfold any pattern of spontaneity.
o o o
The Telegraph
June 07, 2006
WHAT LIES HIDDEN IN THE FOOTNOTES OF THE PAST
Tapan Raychaudhuri considers ways in which a legacy of mutual ill will can
be transformed through honesty, memory and good sense
The author is former professor of modern Indian history at the University of
Oxford
A way forward
Seeds of violence and mutual ill-will once sown are not easily eradicated.
After the partition, the conflict of material interests which fed the fire
was no longer there in India. In East Pakistan, getting rid of Hindus might
have proved to be profitable as their lands and other assets went to the
Muslim neighbours. Similar incentives appear to have been absent in India
outside Punjab, but as events in recent years have shown, there was no lack
of ill will and it could be easily churned up to lethal purpose. Elements in
the majority community, the ‘have nots’ among the ‘haves’ in terms of access
to education, power, status and material well-being, projected a xenophobic
ideology which saw the Muslims as a pampered vote-bank. These projections
ignored such startling facts as that the Muslims had hardly any access to
opportunity: some 13 per cent of the population, they accounted for less
than one per cent of pupils even in secondary schools. The position is much
worse in jobs, professions and universities. Some pampered community! The
other side of this ideology was an undefined Hindutva, which gloried in
destroying mosques and killing Muslims. Persistent organizational effort,
funded by NRIs and others, have turned this politics of hatred into a major
plank in India’s public life.
The poison will not be eradicated in a day and the threat it poses to our
civil life should never be underestimated. It has to be fought at many
levels. First, all must realize that the days of single party rule are over
and that communal hatred is the greatest danger facing our polity. Political
parties need to give top priority to fighting it, to exposing its nature and
projecting its obscenity relentlessly and without cease. Here, I feel, the
vocabulary of our political discourse has to be modified. The sangh parivar
are not Hindu nationalists, for nationalists do not usually arrange pogroms
or condone them. Nor are they fundamentalists, for nothing fundamental to
Hindu belief or practice informs their ideology. Only one expression
describes them; xenophobic fascists. In fact, in the light of their words
and conduct, all decent Hindus should question their right to call
themselves Hindu. They have brought shame on us. In a properly ordered
society, such people would have been expelled from the community. I have
deliberately used very strong language in this paragraph. I have done so in
the belief that movements based on strong negative emotions cannot be fought
in the polite language of rational discourse. Our propaganda against
projects of communal hatred must express our sense of total revulsion: we
must try and implant that revulsion into the psyche of all sane Indians.
Fortunately, the words and actions of the parivar are of great help in this
matter. Theirs is not a language of civilized discourse.
In pre-British days, when the state did not honour our great men, people
devised titles to show their high regard. Mahatma, Lokmanya, Deshbandhu,
Netaji and so on. Since the state machinery is not about to punish the likes
of Modi, Togadia or Advani, using appropriate labels to describe them might
help consolidate and project our sense of disgust. I suggest naradham for
Modi, and kumbhirasru for Advani as a start. Remember Advani’s copious tears
over Ayodhya! What crocodile could beat this old hypocrite, master
manipulator of communal hatred?
Hatred of a community is not simply a political phenomenon; it strikes deep
roots in the culture and psyche of a people. The experience of anti-semitism
in Europe provides ample evidence to prove this point. And when I heard from
a highly educated Bengali that the Gujarat pogrom had become a necessity, I
realized that something has gone very seriously wrong with our social
culture. In the mid-Twenties, the RSS outlined an extremely clever and
sophisticated strategy and it has worked at it with dedication for some
eight decades now. The members refused to call themselves a political body
and focussed on culture. The basic idea was brilliant and simple. In the
Twenties and Thirties, nationalism dominated the social culture of the
Indian people. The RSS aimed to replace it with Hindutva and the ideal of a
Hindu rashtra, which would reduce non-Hindus to the status of a subject
population. They did not get very far until the emotive issue of
Ramjanambhoomi was successfully manipulated, with massive financial aid from
NRIs, to catapult a party which had only two seats in parliament to the
position of the single largest party.
We can learn something from this staggering record. To eradicate the poison
of communal hatred, we need a countrywide organization — not a political
alliance or a party, but an organization which would project and try to
inculcate values most relevant for positive developments in our society in
the 21st century. Away from the goal-oriented and highly purposive education
with which our elite students and their parents seek to facilitate the
passage of our youth to the United States of America, or to highly paid jobs
in the corporate sector, this cultural organization should try and spread
out into every area of our social life. The NGOs willing to cooperate could
be used first for these purposes. And units should be established in as many
universities, schools and colleges as possible. Such an organization should
of course have a wide-ranging programme, trying to inculcate positive values
through classes, discussion groups, drills and active involvement in social
work. The organizational structure of the RSS provides an excellent blue
print for such a body; only positive slogans have to replace its hate-filled
negative messages, I feel sure that if initiative is taken to set it up,
resources will not be a problem.
For the purposes of this essay, I shall focus only on one aspect of the
possible activities of such an organization, — the effort to replace
inter-community hatred with healthier attitudes which would inform the
future development of our society.
For this, we first need to understand the true nature and extent of the
problem. In the Sixties, Aligarh University’s department of psychology did a
limited but very focussed study of mutual images in the consciousness of
local Hindus and Muslims. Similar random surveys in many parts of the
country, focussing especially on areas with experience of inter-communal
riots and strong RSS presence as well as Muslim ghettoes in urban complexes,
might be illuminating. I am not suggesting a multi-million dollar research
project supported by big US foundations, but a much more modest
cottage-industry-style effort using local knowledge and interviews in depth.
Voluntary contributions to such a study should be welcome. We assume we know
what makes a communalist tick or what exactly is the nature and range of his
impact, but do we? The exercise I have suggested would help us identify what
to attack and how. Biographies of communal activists in both communities
would be particularly welcome.
I think it is supremely important that liberal Muslims are involved in such
organized activity. The orthodox ignorant mullah, whose mental world belongs
to the middle ages, has to be expelled from his position of authority.
Muslim society, especially Muslim women, must be free from their unwholesome
influence. The liberal Muslim at some point in time has to take courage in
both hands and initiate legislations which are in conformity with
contemporary needs without references to the scriptures. Muslim women have
already shown considerable courage in such action. Our cultural movements
must strengthen their hands. The obscurantist mullah is something of a paper
tiger. It is worth noting that he does not enjoy the support of the majority
virtually in any Muslim country. The liberal or radical citizens of India,
whatever their community, must at some point stop being mealy-mouthed in
criticizing the reactionary obscurantist.
We also need true histories of inter-community conflict, a history of hatred
à la Annales school. The xenophobic Hindu historian talks endlessly of
Muslim tyranny, the vile nature of the Yavana beast. The radical-liberal
historians, on their part, really do not help by playing down the facts of
Muslim iconoclasm and temple destruction. Whether a Rama temple once stood
where the Babri mosque was later erected is an almost irrelevant issue. What
matters is that such things did happen all over Northern India. Like Eaton,
we need to understand and inform the lay public of the true nature and
context of such happenings. More important, we historians have done a great
disservice to our people by virtually papering over the history of violent
inter-community conflicts. School text-books gloss over them with
one-liners. As the historians of the Subaltern group are now pointing out,
the history of Indian independence and partition virtually relegates the
horrendous suffering of the partition riots, which took some five million
lives, to brief footnotes.
In our cultural propaganda, several points need to be emphasized. First, we
should neither over- nor underplay the fact of communal tension in the past.
What we need to emphasize is that such tensions were real enough but they
shared space in our social consciousness with the far more dominant
traditions of co-existence, cooperation and cultural symbiosis. As
Rabindranath Tagore pointed out in a seminal essay, the material and
cultural environment of the Indo-Islamic era and its inheritor, our
contemporary culture, are the joint handiwork of Hindus and Muslims. From
fabric, dress, food to painting, architecture and music, all our
civilizational and artistic output bears the impress of two distinct
traditions so interwoven that they cease to be identifiable as separate
entities. These are facts accessible to our sense perceptions. And if the
two communities were continually at loggerheads, the marvellous products of
our composite civilization would not have been there.
In being honest about the facts of tension and conflict in the past, we
should locate these in the context of world history. Modern Britain is the
result of a union between four ethnic groups with a very long history of
bitter conflict. So is Germany the end product of union between warring
principalities. Memories of such ancient or even recent conflicts usually do
not poison the present, though old memories at times inform current action,
as in Scotland and Wales. It does not help to nurture grievances, especially
those picked up selectively from the remote past. If Turkish kings destroyed
Hindu temples, it does not help to avenge the insult by attacking mosques
today and killing the descendants of poor Muslims who were converts from
Hindu society. Such actions merely distract us from our task of moving
forward and undermine our basic humanity. Our cultural propaganda must
emphasize not highfalutin ideas but solid good sense. Togadia may want to
hang Ghazni, but Ghazni is long dead. To kill and rape fellow citizens
because they share Ghazni’s faith are acts of sadistic morons.
One final word. On Kurfurstendam, in the centre of Berlin, stands a stone
plaque. It lists without comment the Nazi death camps. The Museum of German
history in the same city contains an entire section, Hitlerfeld, detailing
those horrors. A young German writer wrote a play entitled “Was I there when
Hitler ruled?” He answers the question in the affirmative, because later
generations of Germans, he believes, have not done enough to exculpate the
guilt. What about us? What have we done to repent and transcend the sins of
our partition riots? Does any Hindu or Muslim in the three countries of the
subcontinent feel ashamed that they are descended from the monsters of the
partition riots in 1946-47 or of the Dhaka pogrom in 1971. Have we
apologized for what we did to Delhi’s Sikhs? We need a black book of our
misdeeds to be made available to every literate person in three countries.
We need museums dedicated to the horrors of communal riots, so that the
rising generations learn to hang their heads in shame for the sins of their
forebears and say, “Never again.”